Another night visited by another disturbing nightmare. It seemed to be connected to the one where he had surrendered to Nina and took place some time afterwards. The siblings were somewhere he didn't recognise and in front of them knelt a man, his hands tied behind his back and his head covered with a heavy sack. Passing Alex a gun, Nina told him to shoot the man and it was obvious to him that this was the test to prove that he had truly changed sides. He slowly placed the gun against the back of the man's head, closed his eyes and fired one shot deep into the man's brain, killing him in an instant. Nina smiled at him and made a show of removing the heavy sack, revealing the man to be Jack.
As he made his way to work, Alex contemplated the scenario. If he ever really did switch sides and join Nina, was he capable of doing such a thing? Even for CTU, he had only killed once and that had been a legitimate shooting, not cold blooded murder of a bound man on his knees. He decided that it wasn't useful to dwell too much on it.
Once he had arrived at work, Tony had approached and asked him to come to his office, not revealing the reason until they had sat down.
"Well, the drug test showed nothing but trace amounts of alcohol, so you're clear for that," Tony informed him. He had never really believed that Alex was taking drugs and so the results came as no shock. Alex nodded, relieved that at least one of the three charges had been removed although it still left two that were harder to disprove.
"About the cameras, you know I can't do that to Kim," Alex spoke. She wanted it kept to as few people as possible, and if he were to admit what was on the footage as well as the reason for deleting it, then it wouldn't just be Chappelle who would find out. Many at Division would discover it too, and from there it would likely spread through gossip.
"You shouldn't have deleted the footage. What about the attack?" Tony asked. He had been surprised to hear about the incident, it didn't sound at all like Alex so he was ready to believe that it really was self-defence. Of course, he knew Adam enough to know that him attacking someone was out of character too.
"I wasn't even here at the time, it was after work and I was miles away on the other side of the city. All of a sudden, this CTU SUV starts chasing me, I got trapped in an alleyway and saw no other way of escape other than defending myself. Adam was wearing a mask, I had no idea who it was until I managed to knock him to the ground," Alex explained, hoping that Tony would see just how ridiculous the whole scenario was.
"I guess you can't tell Chappelle about it?" Tony asked.
"Not unless I can get Adam to corroborate my story, and I don't know whether he will or not," Alex replied. He wondered why Adam had even gone along with it in the first place.
Moments later, he was leaving Tony's office and making his way to Adam's desk before quietly asking him to join him in the break room. Once they were there, he hoped that the conversation would lead somewhere.
"What exactly did Jack ask you to do?" Alex spoke to him as they sat down. It had been a major escalation to involve another agent in this way.
"He just said to follow you, making sure you couldn't identify me, to try and scare you," Adam replied as he recalled the conversation he had with Jack.
"Why did you go along with this?" Alex asked, and Adam shrugged.
"He's a senior agent, plus ever since I started here I've heard people voicing suspicions about you so I assumed it was about that," Adam replied, and neither of those came as a surprise to Alex.
I wonder what would happen if I resigned or forced them to fire me in some way? Would they monitor me just in case I really was on Nina's side? They probably prefer keeping me around anyway.
"Thanks for the answers, Adam. Please keep this to yourself, but there's an investigation into me and that includes what happened between us," Alex spoke. The last thing he needed was for the investigation to be spread around CTU, but he felt that Adam would at least keep it quiet.
"Maybe I could say something to Chappelle, on your behalf?" Adam asked, and Alex considered the offer. It would certainly help him, but it might be bad for Adam.
"I would really appreciate that, but think hard about it. I don't want to be dragging you into anything," Alex replied, grateful that Adam had offered. It meant that he definitely would be keeping the investigation to himself.
Kim glanced over at the break room door and thought of the two men inside. She had not wanted any of this to happen. Her growing love for Alex was strongly conflicting with her love for her father, who was behaving erratically and in a way that scared her. His reasons for opposing the relationship were understandable, but she disliked how he was just disregarding her own choices. Even if Alex was the brother of the woman who killed her mother, he had shown that he was nothing like her ever since her mother's death. As Alex returned to his desk, the two looked at each other and smiled.
Sitting back down, Alex wondered what else he could do. The drug test had cleared him of the drug use accusation, and if Adam spoke to Chappelle that could clear the assault charge, but there was still the camera footage to worry about. He couldn't tell Chappelle what it showed as that would go against Kim's wishes and so deleting it was the one issue he could do nothing about. Even then, there was probably something else they could add to beef up the investigation, and he began to scour his mind for anything that could be used against him. Then he remembered.
The phone call, a few days after Nina was arrested, from her employers. They seemed very interested in recruiting me as her replacement, but I refused that offer without considering it. CTU has never said anything about it, so maybe they don't know about it? Yet they were investigating everyone after Nina's arrest and that included analysing my phone, so maybe they do know and just haven't acted on it? Would Jack use it against me and if he would, why hasn't he?